Performance Characterization of a Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial System with Co-Channel Interference over Generalized Fading Channels

The transmission of signals in a hybrid satellite-terrestrial system (HSTS) in the presence of co-channel interference (CCI) is considered in this study. Specifically, we examine the problem of amplify-and-forward (AF)-based relaying in a hybrid satellite-terrestrial link, where the relay node is operating in the presence of a dominant co-channel interferer. It is assumed that direct connection between a source node (satellite) and a destination node (terrestrial receiver) is not available due to masking by obstacles in the surrounding. The destination node is only able to receive signals from the satellite with the help of a relay node located at the ground. In the proposed HSTS, the satellite-relay channel follows the shadowed Rice fading; and the channels of interferer-relay and relay-destination links experience generalized Nakagami-m fading. For the considered AF-based HSTS, we first develop the analytical expression for the moment generating function (MGF) of the overall output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Then, based on the derived exact MGF, we derive novel expressions for the average symbol error rate (SER) of the considered HSTS for the following digital modulation techniques: M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK), M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) and M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM). To significantly reduce the computational complexity for utility in system-level simulations, simple analytical approximation for the exact SER in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime is presented to provide key insights. Finally, numerical results and the corresponding analysis are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed performance evaluation framework and to view the impact of CCI on the considered HSTS under varying channel conditions and with different modulation schemes.